Kenny Chesney, king of summer, presides over the Meadowlands

"This is feeling like a summertime tradition," Kenny Chesney told more than 53,000 cheering fans at MetLife Stadium on a beautiful Saturday night. Many in the house were there two Augusts ago when Chesney confounded skeptics and city slickers by throwing the biggest country show in the history of the Garden State. Others were in attendance when he did it again last year. This time around, doubters were hard to find.

Of course Chesney would pack them into the Stadium, and of course he’d have them all singing and shouting until they were hoarse. There would be tailgating in the parking lot for hours and. once the sun went down, everybody would crowd into the sold-out stadium to hear Chesney’s tales of oceanside revelry and the bittersweet onset of middle age. He’s summer’s resident balladeer, and these warm evenings belong to him.

Chesney’s songs are as easy to follow as the lantern-lit path from the ocean to the beach bar. They’re designed to be quick to learn, too: Even if you don’t know one, chances are you’ll be able to sing along by the time the band reaches the second chorus. His version of country is heavily colored by contemporary pop, Mellencamp-style arena anthems and, occasionally, crowd-pleasing reggae and island music.

He is no purist: If a sound is redolent of the hot months, Chesney will appropriate it. Everything is designed to go down easy; Chesney, who possesses a genial baritone and an exuberant delivery that verges on sun-struck giddiness, isn’t up there to challenge anybody. He’s a painter in pleasant watercolors: Like a shore town artist with an easel and a box of pigments, he can bring a summertime scene alive in a few deft strokes. His characters fall in love as the sun disappears over the horizon; they drink wine out of Dixie cups and put both bare feet up on the dashboard of the car; they tread the boardwalk and hear the band at the pavilion and the kids playing skee ball.

Yet even his tales of revelry carry a wistful undercurrent. Chesney sings of a perpetual August sliding into September — his songs are ripe with a sense of completion and the passage of time. On his recent albums, he hasn’t exactly gotten deep, but as this pirate looks at 40 and beyond, he has become meditative. The anchors of Saturday’s 90-minute concert were the impressionistic ballads: "You and Tequila," a story of dangerous infatuation that saunters like a cowboy at a trot; the faded-Polaroid reflections of "Somewhere With You," and "Come Over," an insomniac’s plea to a lover and an expression of midlife romantic longing.

Chesney did the party songs, too, of course — "No Shoes, No Shirt, No Problems," "Living in Fast Forward," the subtly provocative "Everybody Wants to Go to Heaven" — and seemed to relish every exhortation to drink and get wild. He encored with the winking barnyard tale "She Thinks My Tractor’s Sexy," which is about as goofy as contemporary country gets. But he did not succumb to the temptation, as he often did at his first two MetLife concerts, to tip into muscular, beer-swigging heartland rock. Instead, he emphasized the country elements of his songs and cleared space in the mixes for his excellent sidemen — particularly pianist Wyatt Beard, whose sonorous chords underscored the regret buried beneath the warm sand of "Beer in Mexico," and pedal steel player Jim Bob Gairrett, whose closing solo on "Tequila" was luminous as a California sunset.

Chesney was joined on "When I See this Bar," his latest single, by Eric Church, the evening’s main support act. Church, a North Carolinian singer-songwriter who references alcohol consumption in nearly all of his devilishly clever lyrics, nearly stole the show with a scalding hourlong set that found middle ground between Merle Haggard and Metallica. Many of his songs were collisions between banjo, acoustic guitar patterns, sludgy, overdriven electric guitar riffs and thunderous drum fills. A fired-up Church punched the air and snarled as he sang "How 'Bout You," a two-fisted defense of small-town values, and praised Scotch whisky during an extended version of "Drink in My Hand," a swaggering slice of country-rock.

The other two opening acts were not as commanding. Kacey Musgraves’ thin chirp and fine, modest songwriting were swallowed up by the immensity of the stadium; the Eli Young Band was hardworking, tough and tight, but offered nothing that many other Skynyrd-inspired bands haven’t done better.